Chapter Text
“M’lady?”
“Yes?” Marya looked up from the letter on her lap to see the startled face of their cook. Her tone was too sharp again. She would have to watch herself.
“What is it, Alla?” she said, in a softer tone this time.
Alla began apologizing. Her son Dale, named after Marya’s eldest, had been hunting in the woods with the butcher’s son Emmon. The forest around the keep was swarming with red deer. Marya’s husband and elder sons had hunted there often when they were home, and Davos had allowed their servants to hunt there as well. But they were always reminded not to hunt the stags, only the does. Stags were rarely seen in these woods, and their numbers were small and should not be reduced more. This had been Davos’ reasoning, but Marya knew that it was not the only reason. It was also partly superstition, the same way Davos made offerings to the Warrior before going to battle, or to the Smith before launching a ship, even though, before the battle of Blackwater Bay and the demise of their sons, the gods had not really meant much to Davos the rest of the time. Hunting a stag would have felt like hunting his own liege lord in her husband’s mind.
The boys swore up and down that they did not see the antlers. They thought they were going after a doe, Alla explained. It was only after the arrows had been released and the animal had gone down that they realized what they had truly killed.
The antlers were short and small, Alla insisted. “You can see for yourself, m’lady. They’ve brought it back, the stag, it’s in the kitchen. I hope his lordship will not be angry. The boys did not mean to defy him. Not on purpose, that is.”
Marya tried to calm Alla down, telling her that it was an honest mistake, that Lord Davos would not blame Dale and Emmon for it.
Alla was not placated. “You should look at the antlers yourself, m’lady,” she said, anxiously.
The servants fearing her disapproval had made Marya very uncomfortable in the beginning. She was not an unreasonable or unkind mistress, and certainly not a petty or cruel one. Why were the servants looking at her almost as anxiously as if she were any other highborn lady, or as if she were a sharp-tongued dowager?
But then, she recalled her own life before she was Lady Marya, how so much had felt so dependent on the whims and caprices of this lord or that lady, how your life could change in an instant, if you accidentally incurred the wrath or displeasure of a highborn lord or lady. She and Davos were far from being highborn, but they now occupied a certain position in life, and for them not to see and understand how that position would affect the way the servants saw them would have been willful blindness and a shirking of responsibility on their part.
It was not just about her own conduct as mistress of the keep. It was also about the ways of the world. And Marya was always mindful of this. A stray cross word or too sharp a tone from her tongue could mean a servant fearing for her livelihood, or even her life, even if to Marya herself, it had not meant anything important and she was actually annoyed with something or someone else at the time.
To pacify Alla’s fear, Marya went down to the kitchen with her. Alla’s Dale – she could not say that name aloud these days without thinking of her Dale - and Emmon the butcher’s son were standing near the back wall, both slouching, eyes downcast, looking guilty. They straightened up immediately when they saw her, a chorus of “M’lady,” greeting her. She walked towards Dale and gently pushed back the hair falling across his face. A boy about two years older than her Devan. Still very young. She smiled and said, “Don’t worry, your mother already told me what happened.” He smiled tentatively in reply, but said nothing.
Emmon, the older of the two boys, was the one who spoke. “The stag must have just shed his old antlers, and the new one just started growing. That’s why they’re so short and small, m’lady.” Marya nodded at him, and followed him to the butcher’s table where they had put the carcass. They had taken the arrow out, but she could see the mark through his throat clearly. The stag must have died almost instantaneously.
“It was a good shot,” she said, looking at Emmon. He was the much better hunter of the two.
“It wasn’t my arrow, m’lady. Mine missed the mark completely. It was Dale’s.”
The antlers were indeed very short. She could see how the boys could missed it from a distance.
“Well, nothing to be done now. We might as well eat the meat,” Marya said.
“But … his lordship?” Alla’s voice was still fearful.
You have nothing to fear from him, Alla. Especially now, thought Marya.
“His lordship did not want people purposely hunting the stag, because they are rare. But this is an accident.”
Marya could see another thought flashing through Alla’s mind. “The Baratheons eat stag meat too,” she said, kindly. Alla looked surprised, her cheeks reddening. “It should be butchered immediately, before the meat goes bad,” Marya continued.
“I’ll get my father,” Emmon said.
Marya was staring at the stag’s head. Eyes closed, he looked so at peace that it infuriated her suddenly. That look of almost calm acceptance of death felt like a mockery to her.
You should have run faster, or hide better.
“No, I will do it myself,” she said, impulsively. She wanted ... no, needed ... to bring down a cleaver on that stag with her own hands, with her own strength.
Her words were greeted with the look of shock on three faces. She smiled. “I have done this before, you know. I was not always the fancy lady in her fancy dress,” she teased, to put Alla, Dale and Emmon at ease. “And Emmon could help me butcher the stag.”
It was Alla who replied, “Of course, m’lady. But now you are a lord’s wife, and that is even grander than a knight’s wife. It’s not for the likes of you, a dirty task like this.”
Dale was watching Marya’s face. She did not know what he saw there, but he finally said, “Lady Marya knows what’s what, Mother. Leave her to it.” Alla reluctantly followed her son out.
“I’ll get the knives and cleaver,” Emmon said, as Marya was putting on an apron.
They started with removing the innards, Emmon pulling out the intestines and the stomach, Marya removing the liver, lungs and heart. The heart should still feel quite warm, for the stag had not been dead for long, but the weather had turned cold, for winter was coming, and it felt really cold in her hands.
But still warmer than the heart of that man with a stag on his sigil, she thought. No, not just a stag now, a stag inside the flaming heart of the Lord of Light.
Lord Stannis had written to her after the battle at Blackwater Bay, telling her that Devan was safe, but Davos and her four sons were missing, presumed dead. I would not advise you to hold out any false hope, my lady, he had said, in his usual blunt way. None of those lost at sea has returned, he had added. The letter was not flourished with excessive words of condolences or sympathy, which Marya had neither expected nor wanted in any case, as she had not expected the letter itself. The words and the name were written by the same hand. Stannis Baratheon’s own hand, she presumed, and not the hand of a maester.
“M’lady?” Emmon’s voice jolted her. She looked down at her hands and realized she was still holding the stag’s heart in her tight grasp. Emmon was holding out a bowl. She placed the heart in the bowl.
The next step was cutting off the feet, she recalled. “What does your father tell you about cutting off the feet?”
“It must be done cleanly at the joints, and we must not break or shatter any bones, because the marrow inside the bones could spread an illness, m’lady.”
“Very good, Emmon.” The boy was learning well from his father, amd soon it would be time to find him a position of his own.
She felt around the bones and cartilages to find the joint, finally found it, and was about to bring the cleaver down when she thought of someone else bringing a cleaver down on joints. Finger joints instead of feet. She hesitated, and the cleaver stayed suspended in mid-air, without reaching its destination.
“M’lady? Would you like me to do it?”
Let him do it. You don’t have to do this yourself.
But she would not relinquish the cleaver. She would see this through to the end herself.
“I will do it myself. But thank you, Emmon,” she said, smiling slightly.
“Only ... my father said –“
“Your father said that you must not hesitate when you are bringing down the cleaver?”
“Yes, m’lady, or it will not be a clean cut.”
She steeled herself. Her hand was steady, not shaking at all, and she brought the cleaver down quickly. One foot came off cleanly, as did the other three.
Davos’ wound had healed by the time he came back to her. The maester at Storm’s End had taken good care of it, he said, and the lord was very good with the cleaver. Davos carried the finger bones with him always. For luck.
I lost them at Blackwater Bay, Marya. I lost our luck, and our sons. Forgive me, he had written to her.
Not your fault, my love. And we make our own luck, she had written back.
That was the letter from Davos confirming the death of their four sons, or really the letter written by Devan, but containing her husband’s words. She had found it strange reading her husband’s words in Devan’s writing. Davos’ letters had usually been from Matthos’ hand, who served with his father on Black Betha.
She would never read a letter written in Matthos’ hand again. Her shy son, whose letters to her were only short notes scribbled below his father’s words, who always told her everything was fine, who rarely complained about anything. Who blushed and shied away when she embraced him in front of his brothers, but who always came to her room, alone, before leaving home, to hug her long and hard, to kiss her on the cheeks.
Allard’s letters were usually full of complaints, but that was how she found out about most things regarding her husband and her four elder sons when they were far away from her side. Allard, her second-born, her wildest, most unruly son, the one her husband was convinced was set for the Wall or even a worse fate, if not for Lord Stannis and all he had given them. Marya was not so convinced of this. Allard always knew how far he could go, and where he must stop before crossing an invisible line.
Allard, with his girl in Oldtown and his girl in King’s Landing and his girl in Braavos, not the wife that she had hoped for him and nagged him about. She regretted the nagging and the scolding now. What did it matter, as long as he was happy? As long as he did not mistreat them. His last letter to her had ended with a request – if he does not return from battle, will she write to them? I know that in the eyes of the world, they are not in the same position as Dale’s wife, but they are to me, in our own way.
She had written to them, just like she had written to Dale’s wife.
Dale. Her firstborn, conceived that first night, for Davos left the very next day and did not come home until months and months later, by which time she already knew that she was with child. Davos had been touchingly surprised, and proud.
“One time? We made a child after one time?”
“Well, it was not one time,” she reminded him. “One night, but more than one time, if you recall.”
He had laughed, a warm, full-throated laugh, touched her belly, put his head close to it and whispered softly, “Your mother and I will have many sons and daughters, so you will have many brothers and sisters to play with, my child. And you will have many sons and daughters of your own one day.”
There had been no sister for Dale. And he would never have any son or daughter of his own. Dale, her proud boy who had been more than content captaining a ship. Not for him a knighthood on dry land. “Not for my sons either, Mother,” he had told her once, out of his father’s hearing. “The sea is where we belong.”
Maric had dreamt of a knighthood. Maric, her third son, the one who had the easiest time adjusting to the change in their circumstances, from a smuggler’s son to the son of a landed knight. The whispers and smirks from the highborn lords and knights never seemed to bother Maric as it had bothered his brothers. All the whispers that Davos Seaworth and his family stank of salted fish, that the smuggler had bought his knighthood with a few measly onions; Maric shrugged them all aside. “Let them prattle,” Maric would say, unconcerned. “We will be knights ourselves someday, and our sons and daughters will wed their sons and daughters, and they will be proud of it. We will make them.” Maric, whose fierce pride and determination were hidden behind his easy laughs and smiles.
Marya and Emmon were working side-by-side, skinning the stag from the neck down. Without its hide, the flesh underneath cruelly exposed, the stag looked pathetic.
Not so grand and mighty now, are you?
Before she lost her sons, she had thought that grief would feel like losing your skin, leaving you raw and exposed, vulnerable to the elements, and to the world at large. But it turned out not to be like that at all, at least not for her. It was more like she had developed a thicker coat of skin, and she felt as if nothing could really touch her anymore. Oh, she did and said all the right things to all the words of condolences and sympathy. But even with other mothers who had lost children of their own, she could not say that she understood their pain, or that they understood hers. Her grief was her own, just as their grief was their own. There was no kinship in grief, she discovered. Not even with her own husband, she was finally willing to admit now.
We shared the loss, but not the grief.
She had heard all the stories from the few survivors coming back to the stormlands after the battle, about the chains and the wildfire. Which of her sons burned to death? Which of them drowned in the murky water of Blackwater Bay? The thought jolted her out of her sleep night after night. And the thought of her husband and Devan being there, watching as their sons and brothers perished. The thought of them lying awake night after night, reliving the memory, kept her awake too.
Devan, her oldest son now. Devan, who looked so much like Dale at that age they could have been twins. Devan, who had grown up much too soon, who had been in battles and seen men dying horribly at eleven. Devan, whose letters to her were often about his worries about everyone else other than himself.
Father is having a hard time learning to read. Should I offer to help him, Mother? He might feel slighted, as if I think I am better than him.
They’ve taken Edric Storm somewhere. Princess Shireen is sad and lonely again.
His Grace is not eating. I wish the cook here is as good as Alla.
Mother, do Steff and Stanny dream about our brothers?
They do, my son. They dream of your dead brothers, and of you and your father too. She had never written those words to him.
“They will never come back, Father and Devan,” Stanny had cried out one day, out of the blue. “We will never see them again, ever, just like Dale. And Allard. And Matthos. And Maric.”
Steff, her youngest, had raged hearing that. “That’s not true! Tell him it’s not true, Mother! They will come back.” Pleading, tearful eyes were staring at her, demanding to be reassured. “Won’t they?”
She wanted the earth to swallow her whole, or the sea to devour her completely. She had no words of comfort or reassurance to give her sons. No empty promises to soothe their worries. She did the only thing she could. She gathered them in her arms. They stayed like that, locked in an embrace, the three of them, for what felt like an eternity.
We are here, and we have each other still. She repeated that like a mantra.
They had finished skinning the stag. Emmon was cleaning the knives before they started stripping the meat from the bones.
There had been another letter from Lord Stannis, received just the day before, telling her of Davos’ fate at White Harbor. Another short letter, written in a maester’s hand this time, except for the few words scrawled beneath Stannis Baratheon’s name, which she recognized from the other letter as his own writing.
I will avenge his death, my lady. He has served me loyally, and he was a better man than most.
She raged at his mention of loyalty. Look what his loyalty to you has brought him, has brought us. Stannis had given them everything, her husband had said often, but they had given him plenty in return.
Alla’s Dale was the only one who saw her after she finished the letter. He knew immediately from her expression.
“Is it Devan, m’lady?”
She shook her head.
“His lordship, then. I’m so sorry, m’lady.”
“Don’t tell my sons yet, or anyone else. I will do it myself when I am ready.”
“Of course, m’lady.”
She wondered now if Dale had actually seen the antlers, but released the arrow anyway.
They were down to stripping the meat. Emmon could do this on his own. She had a duty to perform, something she should have already done. She had lost four sons and a husband, but she was still a mother and the mistress of a keep. Lady Marya Seaworth of the Rainwood. Of Cape Wrath.
Her sons first, and then the rest of the household.
She went up to her sons’ room after washing up and changing her clothes. Gathered them in her arms and whispered softly, “I have something to tell you, boys."